Much to savour in bleak battle between youthful hope and aged resignation  

It is not unusual for four or five years to slip by without a single professional production of Beckett – but suddenly his work is everywhere.

In July, there was the Ian McKellen production of Waiting for Godot that set the Wellington theatre world alight. More recently, Robyn Malcolm delivered a star turn in Happy Days, and now at the Basement’s intimate studio theatre we have Krapp’s Last Tape.

It may be serendipity, or perhaps the bursting of the financial bubble has made us more appreciative of Beckett’s bleak brilliance. Whatever the case, we can be grateful for a superb piece of theatre which packs more punch into its 40 minutes than plays three times the length. [More]

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An old man sits in a derelict study, at an old desk upon which rests an old reel-to-reel playback tape recorder. He sighs like an old man with nothing else to do but sigh. He’s a poor elderly intellectual, nose just slightly rosy, his pallid complexion suggesting he hasn’t been out much lately. 

Edward Newborn’s Krapp sits blank, exuding resignation, a numbness found at the other end of mental suffering.   He’s no-one anyone would wish to be, a clownish old curmudgeon ‘celebrating’ his 69^th birthday all by himself with a banana or two and a few belts of the hard stuff. 

There’s a visceral loneliness beyond desperation apparent in many of Beckett’s works – certainly in Krapp’s Last Tape and last month’s rich cousin Happy Days, which also addresses issues around physical and psychological ageing and the inevitably solitary nature of our transient existence. But that piece, like his most famous plays Waiting For Godot and Endgame, illustrates our inevitable solitude by means of dysfunctional interaction between more than one person. 

Grumbling about alone, taking some eccentric pleasure as he does in odd thoughts and the sounds of words, Mr Krapp is well past failing to function with other people; with his handy instrument of sound recording technology the old man is able to construct a dysfunctional relationship with his own middle-aged self. 

Directed by Paul Gittins, Newborn offers a crisp, distilled picture of withered gloom. Within the brief duration of the play we get a real sense of the virtual eternity that this tragic old bugger has lived like this, wallowing in his insignificance. This may be in part because it is in fact a revival production, originally directed by Gittins and performed by Newborn twenty-five years ago at the venerated Theatre Corporate.* 

They even managed to retrieve the original tapes recorded back then, which will be why his voice sounds so authentically young and the tape quality is so authentically deteriorated. That means they’re almost as old as they are meant to be in the play (thirty years) – talk about method! 

To add to its historic status, this is the debut production in the Basement’s new studio venue, a cute little half-pint version of the modestly sized main theatre. A prestigious beginning for a space ideally suited to edgy, experimental fringe type offerings.
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*I only discovered this afterwards – having looked forward to seeing it again since my father took me to see a collection of Beckett works at Galatos Street in the mid-eighties, it turned out it was the same production! …The weird thing is my hazy memory of old Krapp is an older man than the one I saw tonight. I suppose someone in their thirties seems much older to a fourteen year old than an old man seems to someone pushing forty. Or something. 
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